Education Commons^™

Cheating Or Coincidence? Statistical Method Employing The Principle Of Maximum Entropy For Judging Whether A Student Has Committed Plagiarism, Mark P. Silverman

Faculty Scholarship

Elements of correspondence (“coincidences”) between a student’s solutions to an assigned set of quantitative problems and the solutions manual for the course textbook may suggest that the student copied the work from an illicit source. Plagiarism of this kind, which occurs primarily in fields such as the natural sciences, engineering, and mathematics, is often difficult to establish. This paper derives an expression for the probability that alleged coincidences in a student’s paper could be attributable to pure chance. The analysis employs the Principle of Maximum Entropy (PME), which, mathematically, is a variational procedure requiring maximization of the Shannon-Jaynes entropy function …